Open the Door
by LovelyLytton
Summary: "What they had was not love. But it had beauty and it served."   Catherine Carswell, Open the Door.


Open the Door

A/N: Based on a line of the Catherine Carswell novel _Open the Door_, "what they had was not love. But it had beauty and it served."

* * *

He'd met her when he was 19. He was her father's personal assistant, a young man on the way to become someone that mattered in the big, big world. She was 14, more beautiful than a girl that age had any right to be and already sharper than a blade. Standing behind the senator, he watched on as her father handed her the white lilies, as she bowed in response and refused to change out of her miko dress into something fancy and even as she stayed behind at the old shrine when her famous father and an elaborate birthday dinner were calling her forth. Religion was her calling, her vocation. On his way down the stairs, following an enraged Senator Hino off the holy ground, he'd looked back and met her eyes. She didn't smirk, didn't arch one of her delicate brows, but the disdain was evident on her porcelain features. With one knowing look of her dark eyes, she unsettled him. Despite being dressed to the nines, he felt utterly naked. What was he thinking, trailing after a politician and fetching him coffee? He'd fiddled with his tie (and he never fiddled with anything) and quit her father's service before they reached the bottom of the stairs.

* * *

She saw him again when she was 18, burdened by grief and weighed down by worry. Without her grandfather, the Hikawa shrine was lost: he would have known how to draw people in, how to keep them coming to a shrine even when there were theatres and movies and malls to go to. No, it was inevitable. A few more months at most and the shrine would have to close its doors. It was the second time in her life that not even Usagi could change her fate.

With the few people that came to worship, new guests stood out even more. She didin't recognise him at first, head bowed in prayer. He wore his hair long now, and gone were charcoal suit and tie. Instead, he was clad in a way that was achingly familiar: her grandfather had also always chosen white and yellow for his ceremonial robes.

* * *

Three years later, and the Hikawa shrine was restored to its former glory. Well, if you could call giggling school girls and wheezing pensioners glorious, but to Rei Hino, they were. Brushing the many stone steps from top to bottom, she enjoyed the quiet time to think. Her life was good. The shrine was safe, Tokyo was unusually peaceful, her friends were happy and she had a companion at the shrine whom she trusted with all her heart. It was his solemn and respectful manner that had won her over inch by inch, and in the three years they'd known each other, he had never given her cause for strife. Early today, a delicate tea cup in his strong hands, he had asked her whether she would like to marry him. It was a polite query, his fingers didn't shake, no drop was spilled and she had smiled her answer into the morning.

* * *

Her own hair was still black, it looked just like it had when she was nothing but a foolish girl of 14. Of course, her husband would mock her for the thought alone: he insisted that she had never been foolish and always loved to tell her about the day when one look in her ancient eyes had caused him to change his whole life. She knew that he hadn't returned to the shrine to marry her. He had returned because they were one and the same, treading the same path with careful and content steps. But he was growing older and his dark hair soon changed colour. It was a slow process, aging, but Rei didn't mind when silver replaced black. He was just as beautiful to her as before.

* * *

Some things changed when a woman got married. For Rei, those things were both little and small. There was the ring on a finger that had seen no jewellry in all the years before. There were chaste kisses over breakfasts that had formerly been spent in solitude. And there were friends that didn't visit her as often as they used to.

It might have been because Minako was always on one tour or another, working as a make-up artist for whatever pop stars was currently en vogue. But then spring came and with it her friend, walking up the clean stairs to the shrine with a few cherry blossoms still entangled in her chic bob. The sound of her heels had announced her almost before the holy fire did and Rei had been standing in the sunlight, waiting for her to arrive.

When the sound of the heels became louder, Rei called her husband and together, they welcomed their guest. Minako, always one for physical displays of affection, wrapped her thin arms around Rei, shrouding her in a cloud of some doubtlessly hip and expensive perfume. "Happy belated birthday, my friend." Rei smiled into the embrace and found her fists curling into the back of Minako's shirt. Rei did a lot of smiling these days. "I've missed you," that smile said, and she could feel Minako bury her head in the crook of her neck. The two women remained rooted to the spot for the longest time, Rei's husband silent and watchful in the background.

Minako joined their modest dinner, legs carefully folded, skirt smoothed, and Rei could tell that her friend was no longer used to dining without chairs. "How have you been, Minako?" Lowering her chop sticks, Minako forewent food and launched into a lively story about the MTV Video Music Awards, ten galleons of glitter and body paint and an attractive journalist she met there. She recounted how the man was never without a cigarette in his hand, how he was so cheeky that he almost made her blush under the thick powder on her cheeks and how she couldn't wait to go back to him. Rei, smiling, looked to her left and found her husband gone: he had always been able to move noiselessly.

* * *

Rei is 32 when her father comes to visit. It's not her birthday, and he is not welcome. Trailing behind him is the man that replaced her husband as his assistant. Kaidou looks old, older than his years, and certainly older than her husband, Rei notes with pride. Katsurou's hair might already be silver, but the green of his eyes is still bright and his laugh (although seldom heard) is still loud. She made the right choice, she knows that, has known it every day since their wedding. Sometimes she thinks that Minako doesn't agree and neither does Mamoru, but Rei doesn't care. They never told her why, and she never asked. Some things are better left unsaid, Rei thinks, tries to smile and offers her father tea.

* * *

_The End_


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